Always a Thief Read Free Page A

him.”
     
    Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, Max answered his private phone line in a clear, calm voice and listened to Morgan's hasty explanation without interruption. When she was through, he simply said, “I'm on my way,” and she found herself listening to a dial tone.
    Quinn seemed to be unconscious, but he was still breathing. She tucked the blanket more securely around him and went back to her bedroom to quickly strip off her sleepshirt and scramble into jeans and a sweater. Then she returned to kneel beside him. Her fingers trembled as she stroked his thick golden hair and then his cool, damp cheek.
    “If you die I'll never forgive you,” she whispered. He might have heard her, or he might have been too deeply unconscious to hear anything, but his head moved just a bit as if he wanted to press himself more firmly to her touch.
    It was ten interminable minutes before she heard a quick, soft knock at her door and went to let Max in. She had turned on more lamps, so he was able to see Quinn clearly the moment he stepped into her apartment.
    “The doctor should be here any minute,” Max told her, shrugging off his jacket and tossing it over the couch before moving quickly toward Quinn. “How is he?”
    “The same.” She followed and knelt on one side of the unconscious man while Max knelt on the other. His long, powerful fingers checked the pulse, and then he eased the blanket back and looked under the cloths with which she had covered the wound. His hard face rarely showed emotion of any kind no matter what he may have been feeling, and his voice remained dispassionate.
    “Nasty. But not fatal, I think.”
    If a doctor had said the same thing, Morgan probably would have doubted him, but she had known Max long enough to have implicit faith in his judgments. The cold tightness of fear eased inside her, and she felt herself slump a little. “He—he looks so pale.”
    “Loss of blood.” Max replaced the cloths and drew the blanket back up to Quinn's throat with a curiously gentle touch. “And shock. The human body tends to resent a bullet.”
    “It's still in him.”
    “I know. Lucky for him that it is. If it had gone straight through him, he probably would have bled to death by now.” Max looked at her for a moment, then said, “I think he'd be more comfortable off the floor.”
    “If we can get him to my bed—”
    “You go get the bed ready. I'll bring him.”
    Quinn was by no means a small man, and unconscious he was a deadweight, but Max was unusually large and unusually powerful, and he seemed to feel little strain as he carried the thief into Morgan's bedroom and eased him down on the bed. Morgan helped pull his soft-soled boots off, then eyed the remainder of his lean, black-clad form hesitantly.
    “Maybe I'd better do the rest,” Max said.
    She nodded and backed toward the door. “Maybe you'd better. I'll—go make some coffee.”
    She had just filled her coffeemaker and turned it on when the doctor arrived. He was a middle-aged man, with steady eyes and a soft voice, and seemed quite matter-of-fact about having been pulled from his bed to secretly treat a gunshot wound. If Max said it was the right thing to do, he told her comfortably, then that was all he needed to know.
    Someone else with implicit faith in Max's judgment, it seemed.
    Morgan pointed the way to the bedroom but retreated to the kitchen herself. She didn't know how much more she could take but was fairly sure her fortitude would crumble if she had to watch a bullet being extracted from Quinn.
    She could hear the low voices of the doctor and Max, and once a faint groan caused her to bite down hard on a knuckle. She turned the television on to CNN but remained in the kitchen and was working on her second cup of coffee by the time Max came out of the bedroom a few minutes later.
    “The bullet's out,” he reported quietly. “It went in at an angle, apparently, so it was more difficult to get at than it